The Theory of the Arts

by Francis Edward Sparshott

Overview

In a systematic overview of classical and modern contributions to aesthetics, Professor Sparshott argues that all four lines of theory, and no others, are necessary to coherent thinking about art.

Originally published in 1982.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691614229
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #606
Pages:	742
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.70(d)

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The Theory of the Arts

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By Francis Sparshott

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10130-9

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Art and Its Theory

Art is a simple matter. Consider five objects, all familiar at least by proxy: Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Beethoven's Eroica, Dante's Divine Comedy, Michelangelo's David. Each of these is a work of art, if anything is; we would be more surprised if a history of the relevant art left them out than if it included them. Suppose now that you found the experience of looking at, listening to, or reading one of these neither enjoyable nor interesting. You would then feel entitled to say that either you were not up to it (it was beyond you, or was not your kind of thing, or you were not in the mood) or it was no good. That is, you would have no doubt as to what standard should be applied in deciding if it was any good, although you yourself might be in no position to apply it. And the standard in each case would be essentially the same. There is really no doubt about what these things are for. If they were not made for that (something we might not know), at least that is what they are produced and promulgated, preserved and prized for; they are expected to provide worthwhile experiences merely in being listened to, looked at, or read. The less doubt we have that that is what a thing is for, the more confidently we take it to be a work of art. All that part of life which consists of the production, enjoyment, study, and other activity in relation to such objects we refer to in a loose and vague way as "art"; the practices of producing different sorts of them are the arts, and the people who produce them are artists.

There is, then, really no problem about what art is and what art is for. Nor is there anything that cries out for explanation in the practice of art. It is plainly something that people find engrossing and enjoyable in all its aspects. We see everywhere people intensely absorbed in the production of works of art for themselves and others, and other people hardly less intent on the enjoyment of scrutinizing them. How could anything so evidently found to be of such direct value be considered problematic, or be thought to stand in need of theory? Of course, art might distract one from other valuable or necessary occupations, but that is only because one cannot do two things at once, and every good is a potential rival of every other good. One might indeed say that art is put to many uses, and claimed to serve many purposes, and that these uses and purposes call urgently for examination. But why should they? They will be extraneous to the value for which art is evidently prized and practiced; why should we concern ourselves with such incidental advantages? May there be many such! It is not in this sense that a good stands in the way of another good. Art theory seems to be much more of a problem than art is, because the purport of art theory is to place restrictions on the manifold good of art, or to impose extraneous demands on what is already found sufficiently good.

All sorts of problems lurk beneath the surface of what I have just written. These problems are what books like this one deal with. But the surface itself is clear, and it is important not to lose sight of this superficial clarity. One can too easily be tricked or shamed — by fancy arguments or by blatant appeals to one's humility — into making a mystery of art. And one may then come to suppose that art is somehow suspect, in need of justification before the bar of reason, its evident worth insufficient without some further values that a profound theorist might find in or behind it. But it is not so. Art needs nothing from theory.

If art is a simple matter, why should it become a problem? A man who paints pictures or writes poems is doing something that is of absorbing interest to himself and may give harmless pleasure to others. Even if it seems strange that this should be so, we might as well accept it. Not everything about people can be explained or need be. Yet art has become problematic. This seems to have happened in three ways. First, it has come to be supposed that poets and painters are in some sense doing the same sort of thing, and it is not easy to say in what sense this is so. Second, it is claimed that the class of activities to which both poetry and painting belong may also include the most diverse forms of behavior, such as leading cows through a maze or proposing to wrap a countryside in cellophane. Some such claims are hotly disputed, and it is not easy to see how they are to be assessed. Finally, it is claimed that all such activities are important, and that their importance has nothing to do with any simple pleasure they may give. People who have to do with works of art only for the pleasure and interest they find in them can find this claim very unsettling.

These three ways in which art has become problematic add up to a sort of imperialism. The various arts form an alliance, annex neighboring states, and proclaim themselves an empire with a historic mission. What art theory does is mostly to scrutinize the credentials of this empire.

Some people say that such scrutinizing of credentials is a waste of time. Art being the simple matter it always was, such complexities are a matter of power politics and may be left for history and sociology to disentangle. Nor are theorists required to define the word "art," which is used in such different ways in different contexts that one cannot suppose that there is any systematic connection to be found between the various uses. But it is too late for such heroic measures. Art theory already exists. It is too plentiful and too popular to be ignored. In fact, the very arguments I used to show that art theory was gratuitous may be turned around and used in its defense. People do theorize about art freely, and with gusto, and it is natural that they should. Since art is of absorbing interest, it would be absurd not to talk about it; and talk that rises above gossip enters the domain of theory. Besides, though art as a whole may need nothing from theory, an artist and his supporters may feel a very practical need to give reasons why attention should be turned their way, or to explain how an excellence not evident here and now will become clear when rightly viewed. The problematic moves in art and its theory often come from the inertia of practice, as an artist takes what seems to him the natural or inevitable next step along a road on which he inevitably becomes more and more lonely. The resulting diversity of lonelinesses is such as already to cast doubt on our initial simplicities. But the exigencies of isolation fall far short of explaining the tangled mess of inchoate theorizing that accompanies the creation of art. The arts seem always to have been the sort of activity one explains and argues about as one engages in it. Perhaps the fact that art is felt to call for a lot of explanation is one of the things about art that most needs explaining.

People theorize incessantly about the arts, and will go on doing so. Since many of those people will be better at art than at theory, it can hardly be out of place for a professed theorist to bring a little order and clarity into the theorizing. What are the alternatives? To leave people to get on as best they can? But unless all theories are equally clear, equally defensible, and of equal scope, there is no special merit in such renunciation. One might certainly turn away from all such theorizing in disgust at its abstaction, its inadequacy to the subtlety and richness of our more specific engagements with art. But to do so might be rather like rejecting all maps because they fail to reveal the concrete experience of the terrain. That might be a foolish thing to do. Certainly, all actual maps are full of errors. No useful road map, however free from errors, can be detailed enough to tell one much about the countryside, and no map whatever can indicate what it is like to live in the place it maps. But that is no reason for giving up maps altogether or for using maps only of places one cannot visit. Even a close and intimate knowledge of a place is no more a substitute for a map than the map is a substitute for it, nor does such knowledge make even a bad map useless. Maps provide a supplementary orientation, a kind of summary overview that fills its own place. So too one might think that a highly general theory would provide an orientation for reflection at a level on which we often reflect and are surely not wrong to do so. Why should we not try to frame reasonable notions about the general purport and interrelations of the main sorts of things people do with their lives? One might concede that point and still wonder what such a general theory could possibly contain. Obviously it could not say everything about every issue. On what principles could one decide what to put in, what to leave out? But a general theory of art is not one that purports to tell the whole truth about art. It is rather one that seeks to indicate what art is all about, where art fits into the general scheme of social life, what we are asking ourselves when we wonder what art is, and so on. And such questions, though general in the sense that their scope is broad, are as specific as any others.

Someone might concede that the spinning of general theories about art is humanly and practically justifiable, as I have argued, but objectionable in principle: the very notion of a general theory of art is an absurdity, so that what passes for such, if it contrives to make sense, would more properly go under another name. One such objection formed a basic principle of SA, in which I urged that a theory could not be defined by a subject matter (such as art) but only by a problem to which it essayed a solution. But that objection, if it has any force at all, fails to rule out such a theory as we are here considering. In the first place, as I have just suggested, it is not obvious that "What is Art?" is not a specific problem in the required sense. In the second place, the objection will not hold if the concept that forms the subject matter is one developed, as the concept of art was, in response to a theoretical demand rather than to the pressures of everyday discourse, for such a subject matter embodies the specific concerns that led to its formulation. In the third place, the objection would not hold if the subject matter was not a mass of phenomena but a set of activities defined by a function or complex of functions in relation to other human activities, for the general theory would then have the clear task of establishing what that function (if any) was, how it was determined, and so on. Nor will the objection hold if art is not a kind of thing but a way of thinking about things.

Another objection to the very idea of a general theory of art purports to derive from the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A word like "art," one argues, takes definite meaning only from the exact way it is used in this or that context of life. In general philosophical theories, such a context is lacking: the language idles, the verbal machinery is not connected to anything. This objection certainly has weight, as a warning that whatever a philosopher may say can have no authority over the serious and complex engagements of life. But the precise measure of that weight is hard to assess; indeed, the objection almost defeats itself. Not only is it itself a theory of a very general sort, but it invites the rejoinder that theorizing is an activity like any other, a language game with familiar rules, a part (however sluggish) of the stream of life. The theorizer uses the word "art," not without any context, but with a theoretical context: the only question is just what machinery the spinning wheels are meshed with. Wittgenstein wrote as if he thought philosophers would stop doing philosophy as soon as they realized that what they were doing was not identical with some other, reputable activity. They continued to philosophize, perceiving correctly that philosophy was itself a reputable and long established activity, to the nature of which Wittgenstein never paid serious attention. The appropriate response to this sort of objection would therefore seem to be caution in theorizing rather than abstention from theory.

Though one may insist that the idea of a general theory of art makes some sense, and that one might produce a theory to which such a description would be apt, and that such a theory would have some use in ordering one's reflections on a matter of general interest, actually to propose such a theory requires some hardihood. The project of bringing new order and clarity into theorizing about art is presumptuous and foolish. Existing theories of art were framed by people most of whom were at least as intelligent and well informed as we are; a new theory is accordingly unlikely to annihilate them, and if it exists alongside them it will only add to the mess. Nor can we expect that future theorists, equally bright and knowledgeable, will be reduced to silence because we have spoken. Order and clarity, it seems, cannot be introduced by superseding or preempting alternative theories. They could only come from a framework within which the relations of various theories could be discerned and their justifications and limitations mapped in such a way that the choice of a limited theory remained a live option but was not imposed as a necessity. And the same framework could provide a schema for justifying or deploring any practices in the arts that depended on such theories for their justification.

Theorizing about art has involved radical disagreements both about what art is and about what is art, about how to describe the phenomena and about what phenomena are to be described. It is hard to see how theories that differ not only in what they assert but also in what they assert it about can be regarded as alternatives to each other. There are three likely explanations of all such strange rivalries. One is that rival groups are trying to take over a social institution with its associated roles and privileges. Another is that tendencies and processes stemming from a common root have taken divergent directions and are claiming legitimacy against each other. The third is that practitioners of rival practices are each claiming for their own doings a certain kind of esteem. If, as I suspect, all three explanations apply to the present case, a reconciling frame of reference might take the form of a schematized and rationalized history tracing the dynamic relations of the concepts and institutions (together with their associated practices and values) around which the ideological battles rage.

Present Purposes

What this book attempts is fundamentally a dehistoricized history of the kind I have just mentioned: a rational reconstruction of the logical relationships whose half-systematic exploration has formed the history of the philosophy of art. But it is in no sense a history. The ideas are systematically set out, as permanently possible ways of thinking, in an attempt to provide a coherent way of thinking about art for the future rather than to recount how it has been thought of in the past.

If one could find an approach to art that not only evidently suited its subject but had some claim to be the only proper one, and if one could develop that approach from a natural beginning to an inevitable conclusion, and in doing so could combine a single coherent way of organizing all one's thought about art with a demonstration that all other approaches are partly justified but ultimately limited, one could claim to have produced not one theory of art among others but the theory of art. Such would have been the aspiration of this book. But it seems only an idle dream. There will always be other ways of doing things, and even on the way one has chosen one cannot rid oneself entirely of discontinuities and arbitrary decisions. Nonetheless, such preemptive inclusiveness has been my ideal. Accordingly, I have accepted the duty of dullness. Grand speculations and breathtaking challenges are certainly not out of place in discussing art or anything else. They are almost always interesting and exciting rather than true, but truth is not everything — we need truth only where our livelihoods are concerned, but we like excitement whenever we can get it. Unfortunately, systematic inclusiveness demands a plodding sobriety. It may well be a philosophical virtue to do as little philosophy as possible. In any case, the following account aims to be serious, plain, and useful to the perplexed.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Theory of the Arts by Francis Sparshott. Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• PREFACE, pg. vii
• CONTENTS, pg. xi
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xiv
• I. INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
• II. THE CLASSICAL LINE 1: ARTS, pg. 23
• III. THE CLASSICAL LINE 2: ARTS OF DISENGAGED COMMUNICATION, pg. 58
• IV. THE CLASSICAL LINE 3: ARTS OF BEAUTY, pg. 102
• V. THE CLASSICAL LINE 4: ARTS OF IMAGINATION, pg. 137
• VI. THE CLASSICAL LINE 5: WHAT WORKS OF ART ARE, pg. 145
• VII. THE CLASSICAL LINE 6: WHAT WORKS OF ART ARE LIKE, pg. 192
• VIII. THE CLASSICAL LINE 7: THE CRITICAL FUNCTION, pg. 234
• X. THE IDEA OF ART, pg. 281
• XI. THE EXPRESSIVE LINE 1: ART AS EXPRESSION, pg. 303
• XII. THE EXPRESSIVE LINE 2: ARTS, WORKS, ARTISTS, pg. 346
• XIII. THE MYSTIC LINE, pg. 371
• XIV. THE PURIST LINE, pg. 414
• XV. CONCLUSION, pg. 456
• APPENDIX A. AESTHETIC THIS AND AESTHETIC THAT, pg. 465
• APPENDIX B. KINDS OF ART, pg. 487
• APPENDIX C. "GOOD", pg. 494
• NOTES, pg. 503
• BIBLIOGRAPHIC KEY TO WORKS CITED, pg. 685
• INDEX, pg. 713